


And I Can't Forget (But I Don't Remember What)

by synchronized_strangers



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:05:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synchronized_strangers/pseuds/synchronized_strangers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This time it was a pair of Converse. It's been other things in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Can't Forget (But I Don't Remember What)

She can’t be sure, but she thinks this is the tenth time she’s remembered. She knows there have been others. Definitely more than a few. This time it was a pair of trainers, off white and running past on the feet of a student, but it’s not what she sees. She sees a brown slack falling over a high top while they run for their lives. She sees him.

This time it was a pair of Converse. It’s been other things in the past.

Once it was a horror movie and what started off as a joke because honestly, where was their budget, that blood couldn’t look more fake if they put in an effort ended with a stunned sort of silence. 

She watched the villain lift the hero’s brain out of his skull, cradled gently in his palms and said, “They’re born with their brains in their hands...” Then she was screaming bloody murder in a theatre with a fire raging through her mind and that song -- that horrible, aching song -- was in her head.

Once it was a friend telling her about his trip to the Alps and she’d said, “That’s nothing. There are mountains on... On... Oh god... Doctor...” She’d looked at her friend with tears in her eyes and said, “They’ve got mountains on Felspoon that sway in the breeze.” 

That time there had been no screaming because she’d gone into a seizure and been rushed to a hospital. 

Once it was Barcelona. Dogs with no noses. She’d laughed until she gave herself a nosebleed.

She thinks there have been others, too. Maybe a lot of them. Every time he comes. And she knows him, even when she doesn’t. Sometimes he has a different face, wears tweed and a bow-tie but those eyes give him away. 

He’s always sorry. It doesn’t make her hate him any less.

She’s sitting in Cardiff this time when the student dashes past, late to class no doubt. And it doesn’t matter that the girl’s wearing jeans and a jumper. Donna sees a long coat over brown slacks, good hair and a death wish and hears a voice telling her to run. 

This time she tries not to remember. She watches the birds, and the little boy chasing them, and if she also thinks of a brown, furry child on another world chasing sentient motes of light, well, she doesn’t question it, just lets the memory drift like a burning hot spark in her mind. 

There are so many sparks... but it does work, sort of. She’s not screaming anyway. It helps that he’s been in her head so many times now that there are things she can only half recall. He’s mucked about so often there are places in her mind she can’t even go.

Part of her wants to tell him he’s doing it wrong. She wants to show him with senses she doesn’t have how to use a light touch, how much more effective it is and how it leaves less room for damage, but no matter what she remembers there’s one thing she can never forget: Donna Noble is very, very human.

She does her best to forget, it just never sticks.

When he comes, she’s crying silently, searching for a safe space in her head, for a quiet corner where there are no sparks, where she’s only human and she can’t rattle off the algorithm for calculating the rate of gravitational drag on the moon.

She still cries, “No! Please, no...” when he snakes out cool fingers to tear through her consciousness again, even though he takes the fire with him, takes away the pain and leaves her with Donna Noble. 

Because she knows that when she can remember, when something finds the latest crack in his walls and she has to hold the universe in her mind again, the thing she will remember about being Donna Noble is the way the silence in her head feels like ash.

Once, she thinks she begged him to kill her. Maybe more than once. Maybe a lot.

She has just enough time to figure out she could probably calculate the number of times she’s remembered based on the amount of psychic scar tissue he’s left behind if she factors in the size of the breech before she blinks. And that's all it takes. A blink.

Donna Noble is sitting on a park bench in Cardiff. Some bloke is staring at her sitting way too close and looking teary-eyed and she feels like she’s forgotten what she was about to say. There was something on the tip of her tongue... something important...

The more she tries to remember the more it skitters away. She blinks again, eyeing the guy who hasn’t moved at all. Asks, “Can I help you?” She means for it to come out hard, angry, because honestly he is sitting waaaaay too close, but it doesn’t. It sounds... sad and that’s... what was she going to say?

“No,” he answers, smiling a little in a way she knows is fake. “Sorry. Thought I saw someone I knew. Sorry.”

She doesn't even think, just puts a hand on his hand and says, "'Salright, mate. No harm done, yeah?"

Somehow he looks worse than before but his expression doesn't change. It's like she's watching shadows move behind a curtain. His face stays the same but something behind it shifts, twists. He says again, "Sorry."

When he walks away, skinny little whip of a thing, she has the weirdest urge to go after him, straighten his bow-tie -- yeah, that’s right, a bow-tie. Who even wears those anymore? -- and shake some sense into him. No one should be that sad, that alone, and it's so overwhelming that she's half-standing before she can think it through, but he's gone already and that's bad. It's very bad, but she doesn't know why.

It’s not until much later that she wonders how she knew his smile was fake.


End file.
